Halpern

No designer has had more influence on the waves of glamour currently washing over us than young Michael Halpern. When he graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2016 with a fearless collection of all-sequinned tailoring, Donatella Versace snapped him up for her haute couture line, allowing the London-based New Yorker to set up his own eveningwear label. Last season, the sequins that define his contemporary take on 1970s club glam seemed to have covered the entire fashion industry in glitter, and so far this season our infatuation with the stuff is going nowhere. As banner bearer for this zeitgeist – even if he’d be too polite to admit it – Halpern used his autumn/winter 2018 collection to set a bold new agenda for how to wear it. “Inappropriate glamour,” he called it. “It’s the first time we’re doing something that isn’t exclusively evening, blurring day and evening and how people perceive something that’s really over the top in different ways,” he explained.

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Halpern

14 Feb 2018

His season muse was the late New York socialite Nan Kempner, a radical fashion fan, who undauntedly broke with dress codes and wore whatever she pleased, whenever she pleased. Once, Halpern recounted, she was turned away from a formal restaurant for wearing a trouser suit out to dinner – something that was frowned upon for women at the time – and simply went around the corner, took off trousers and wore her jacket as a dress. “They way she lived and treated fashion, she was so inappropriately glamorous at all times of the day. I think that’s so amazing. Why can’t you wear a sequinned jacket during the day?” Halpern reflected. “I don’t mind being called an eveningwear brand, because most people wear it like that, but it’s nice to challenge it.” He did so in tailoring that incorporated haute couture shapes to a heightened degree, amplifying cuts and volumes and slipping cascading draping into jackets. He covered T-shirts – the most humble of daywear garments – in glamorous sequins, and introduced a new sense of texture to his repertoire, most notably in a psychedelic fil coupé in pink and yellow hand-cut with lurex, organza and jacquard, which also graced his thigh-high Christian Louboutin boots.

If it sounds like anything but daywear that’s not entirely untrue, but that was Halpern’s point: a total re-proposal of the way we perceive glamour in a brave new world where dress codes have begun to seem a little antiquated. He framed his show in the rough and barren surroundings of an abandoned office building in Soho, pasting its graffitied walls in seedy pink plastic. It was low and high – grit and glamour – coming together in a way that felt distinctly now. And it was also an homage to his hometown. “When I started this label, I talked about escapism and getting away from the sadness. I didn’t think it could get worse, but now it is,” Halpern said, referring to the political situation in America. “I have a little nostalgia for New York right now. I feel bad for my country and everything that’s happening. It’s not what it was before and a lot of people feel sad now more than ever, so it’s important to me to show that I support America. It wasn’t always like it is now.”